Stone, A.R. (1991). Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118.

An excerpt I like from this paper:

“Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas’s powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single stroke, Gibson’s powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community that established the grounding for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction. As with Paul and Virginia in the time of Napoleon and Dupont de Nemours, Neuromancer in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses in the large.“

Why do I blog this? avidly reading some material about the relationship between media/culture and their possible influence on technological development. In my talk about the user experience of ubiquitous computing (and how it fails most of the time), I often quote the problem of how sci-fi has created a normative future of what should be the tech future. This quote nicely exemplifies this issue by describing how a novel such as Neuromancer can be think of a common ground for engineers and designers. One can see these novels as sort of anchors to point what the future will be.

Wednesday evening was the mini lift session in Seoul at the Yurim Art Hall. Everything went well and a large majority of the 180 people who signed-up came there to hear what Adam Greenfield, Bruce Sterling, Jake Song and Yoo-Suk Yeon had to say about technological implications in space (physical and digital).

Being on stage to introduce the program and the speaker, I was not really in the mood of following everything (anxious by this first event) but everything went well (apart from the tedious changes of laptops and sound issues… as usual). More thoughts and thanks about it on the LIFT blog! Kudos to our 4 speakers as well as local support!

In the end, I think the ambience was great, lots of meeting there and a mix of korean+swiss food. A nice first visit to South Korea for me! I’ll try to blog the talks as soon as I get my thoughts sorted about them

Wednesday started with a talk with Julian at SK Telecom in the Technology Innovation Planning Team, a sort of foresight/innovation group. Our presentation can be found here (.pdf, 15.5Mb).

The point of the meeting was to discuss the near future laboratory methodologies and projects. We spent 2 hours talking, exchanging about foresight methods, trend analysis and how it’s difficult to have a rigorous scientific methodology. Our point was that we aimed at mixing wide-analysis of social, cognitive and cultural trends to inspire sketching and prototyping + testing. Prototypes are not the end per se but a way to try and gain some understanding about tech uses and innovation. A sort of bricolage way to inspect the near future. We insisted on this aspect that we did focus not on tomorrow’s design nor long term-range foresight but 3-4 years ahead.

The presentation also included past project description such as the blogject workshop serie (See the report here and there), insisting on some concrete outcomes and how we appreciated that the meme spread and lead some attendants to design their own projects (see Blinks and Buttons for example).

Present projects we described revolved around the “new interaction rituals” (going beyond current I/O in pervasive computing) and the “new interaction partners” (letting pets participating in video games and the social web).

Thanks JongChae Oh for the invitation!